And so this is how it ends
‘Shock and awe’ curdles into ‘Aw, shucks’
By Mark Thompson
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
The US ended its military campaign in Iraq on September 30, as the final American combat troops based there left the country. Their departure ended 23 years of fitful fighting. They found no weapons of mass destruction, which was the battering ram President George W. Bush and his combative coterie used to scaremonger the US to invade in 2003. We captured Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqis hanged him in 2006. We toppled his Ba’athist regime, only to see it replaced with a government that today is riven with next-door Iran’s influence.
It’s important to remember how this war looks from the other end of the telescope. Two weeks before it began, The Bunker asked Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, how the Pentagon’s ballyhooed “shock and awe” campaign would unfold. “If asked to go into conflict in Iraq, what you’d like to do is have it be a short conflict,” he responded. “The best way to do that would be to have such a shock on the system that the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on the end was inevitable.”
Well, you know what they say about assume. In fact, a fellow Air Force officer, Colonel Clarence Lollar, spelled it out in 1964, 39 years before Myers used the word to explain why the Iraq war would be short:
“Mister, when you have an important job to do, never assume. When you look at the word, you can see it is made up of three parts — ‘ass,’ ‘u,’ and ‘me.’ When you rely on assumptions, sooner or later it will make an ass of both of us.”
Turns out toppling Saddam was only the beginning of a generation-long campaign that cost 4,418 US troops their lives. It will end up costing US taxpayers an estimated $2.9 trillion through 2050, including veterans’ care yet unbilled.
The Bunker spent years reporting on the war, and its spasmodic successes like toppling Baghdad, hunting down Saddam in his “spider hole,” and the jittery calm wrought by “the surge” of US troops into Iraq in 2007. But he also told the stories of those killed, as well as those who killed themselves (and their family). He wrote about the more than 30,000 physically wounded, as well as the roughly 15% of the 1.5 million US troops who served in Iraq who came home mentally maimed. He covered the military’s inadequate, and sometimes fatal, efforts to render aid, even among those trying to deliver it. He reported on the war’s deadly impact on recruiters back home. He wrote about those captured, dead or alive, as they used to say in the Westerns. Not to mention the 3,600 contractors, and perhaps 200,000 Iraqi civilians, killed in the war.
The stories were tough to report, tough to write, and they remain tough to read.
But in the hurly-burly of today’s world, the heroes at the heart of these stories must never be forgotten.
We must remember and honor their sacrifice, even as we ponder its wisdom, given its paltry prize.
Otherwise, it might happen again.
Long overdue, but it must be done right
The same day the US military pulled out of Iraq, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged to continue his campaign to shrink the Pentagon’s nearly 1,000-strong corps of generals and admirals by 20% (he’s currently about halfway there). “The media calls that a purge,” he said. “I call it accountability, and long overdue.”
Accountability, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. We here at the Project On Government Oversight have long fought to cut the US military’s senior ranks. “We have more officers than we need — and we’re running the risk of creating a military force of bureaucrats rather than warriors,” Executive Director Danielle Brian said … in 1998. The numbers don’t lie: The ranks of generals and admirals, as their share of the entire US military, has grown by 40% since Vietnam.
But the cutting has to be smart. Based on the results of the Iran war — so far — it’s plain that neither Hegseth nor his military high command knows how to wage war smartly. Promoting the right military personnel is just as challenging. Bazookaing brass that displease the boss doesn’t automatically lead to a lighter and, to coin a phrase, lethaler fighting force. Based on Hegseth’s track record, his thinning of the herd is likely to be more about politics and partisanship than proficiency and prowess.
“This is just a less personal version of the purge he’s already been executing since taking office,” Virginia Burger, a Marine veteran now here at POGO’s Center for Defense Information, says. “By announcing he’s cutting the generals by 20%, he has justification for refusing to promote scores of officers without even having to pull their names from [promotion] lists. This just lets him continue to remove senior leaders who are in the strongest positions to oppose him and his actions.”
The full article first appeared on The Bunker.